I’ve just finished a project which required me to take a close look at what renewable energy R&D work was going on in Scotland’s universities and what their capabilities are.
I haven’t taken a serious look at the universities since I worked for the now sadly dead Marine Technology Directorate which, in collaboration with industry, used to fund a lot of oil/gas-related R&D and funded some early work on wave energy.
I was therefore very pleasantly surprised and actually quite amazed at some of the stuff going on and how broad the range of R&D they’re working on now is.
Solar photovoltaic technologies, biofuel, wave and tidal, wind – you name it and somewhere in a Scottish university someone will be working on at least some aspect of it.
That said, finding out everything they’re up to is not easy, and I would think that even the work I did was probably only scratching the surface. The universities may be good at research but most are utterly useless at making sure we all know what research they’re actually doing.
I think we all agree that Scotland has a very large renewable energy resource. We know our tidal energy potential is enormous and neatly predictable and we also have the benefit that, while not windy all the time, Scotland is a windy country. Plus, of course, we also have a large wave energy resource, we have biomass we can use and, despite my own occasional scepticism over its potential in these northern climes, we also have solar energy – solar thermal and photovoltaic – we can tap into.
In fact, one of the earliest ever commercial producers of solar thermal panels – AES Solar established in 1979 – is actually based in Aberdeenshire and would appear to be doing very nicely.
AES is of course one of the few companies we have in Scotland that is genuinely exploiting the renewables opportunity and, given that the firm started up when oil and gas were relatively inexpensive, it would seem to me they were probably endowed with the sort of vision and enthusiasm for renewables that some organisations are still sadly lacking, even though the economic imperative is very clear.
I refer, of course, to the remarks by the current heads of the CBI in Scotland and Scottish Engineering, in respect of a proposal by one political party in Scotland to aim for a target of generating all of Scotland’s electricity needs from renewable energy by 2020.
Their knee-jerk reaction was to describe the proposal as “utter nonsense” and “cloud cuckoo land”, as well as “unrealistic” and even “undesirable”.
Well, of course, we know now that they didn’t actually read the proposal properly, because if they had they’d have realised quite quickly that the idea is for Scotland’s renewable energy sector to generate the equivalent of 100% of annual electricity demand, not 100% of electricity output.
It also did not imply giving up other forms of electrical generation, but rather a much stronger commitment to have renewables as a considerably larger part of the energy mix.
However, the fact that the CBI and Scottish Engineering misinterpreted the proposal is less important than their reaction to it, which I have to say that I found extremely depressing because it typified the sort of negative, visionless, unsupportive and downright miserable attitude that seems so prevalent in the country today.
If this had been the US, or perhaps even some of our closer neighbours, while the ink was still drying on such a proposal businessmen and women, engineers and funders would have been working together on ideas for new businesses, or how to improve existing businesses, in order to rise to the challenge this proposal for a bigger renewables target actually represents.
Of course, the Americans are in fact already doing that. If you read as many press releases and other information from US renewable energy organisations as I do, you’d also understand that progress on the other side of the North Atlantic is in fact very rapid. It may be a little chaotic, but it is definitely heading in the right direction.
However, regardless of what I found was going on in Scotland’s universities and what companies like AES Solar and others are doing, there is a long, long way to go before Scotland can claim it is really exploiting the opportunity as well as the resource. It is therefore troubling to find that one of the hurdles to achieving this is the “attitude” of a couple of our key business leadership organisations.
Politicians also talk about renewables being the foundation upon which we could re-industrialise Scotland, to create jobs and so on and so forth.
It may sound glib and very “motherhood and apple pie”, but actually they’re right. Renewable energy represents a huge economic and industrial opportunity and, although it’s important to realise that we’ve already missed out on a large part of that opportunity – mainly due to idiotic political decisions made over the past 30 years, there are still plenty of new challenges.
For example, all those that moan and bitch about how useless wind turbines are might be interested in the prospects for energy storage. That’s to say the ability to store excess energy so that it can be used when there’s not so much wind.
Now this storage could come in the shape of “flow batteries” which are massive electrochemical devices that act like super batteries, it could be to use excess electricity to produce hydrogen from water and store it for later use, or it could be to use that excess to power pumped storage, although of course new hydro will undoubtedly annoy some.
Then there are new fuels. In Scotland we’re still not doing much in this sector and yet we have some of the best bio-tech people in the world working on life sciences issues.
Let’s mobilise these people to do more to solve the impending liquid fuel supply issue.
Now, I’m not going to trawl through each sector in which I think we could do better, but needless to say I believe passionately that if we wanted to provide all our electricity and a whole lot of our other energy requirement from renewable sources then we could do it.
There’s a huge opportunity here and if the CBI and Scottish Engineering are not prepared to get involved then that’s fine, but more fool them.
The world is changing fast and they need to keep up.
If we’re going to exploit the renewables opportunity properly, I’m happy to leave them behind; to misquote a certain US president, we need people with a “can-do” not a “don’t-want-to-do” attitude.
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